This invention relates to apparatus for charging coffee makers with bottled water.
Commercial type automatic drip coffee makers are usually adapted to be charged with cold water through a direct attachment to plumbing from municipal water supplies. This permits rapid and easy filling of the coffee maker with the amount of water needed. Traditionally, the flow of water from the plumbing is controlled by a timer, built into the coffee maker, which operates an electromagnetically actuated solenoid valve. Taking into account the rate of flow of the water from the given plumbing, the timer is set to open and close the solenoid valve so to fill the coffee maker with the necessary amount of water.
This apparatus suffers from the limitations inherent in the quality of water supplied from the existing water supplies. The automatic coffee makers presently available can fill automatically only using the water available through the building's plumbing. Since the quality of coffee is directly dependent on the quality of the water used to make it, this impairs the use of automatic coffee makers in areas with water supplies containing distasteful contaminents.
Until now some automatic coffee makers could be charged with bottled water only using manual techniques of transferring the water from the bottled water dispenser to the coffee maker. This has proven to be burdensome and time consuming. Moreover, other designs of automatic coffee makers make manual filling impossible.
An object of the present invention is to provide a means for automatically transferring bottled water to coffee makers, thus benefiting from the improved quality of bottled water while greatly reducing the burden of manually transferring water from a water bottle to a coffee maker.
An additional object of the present invention is to provide apparatus for transferring bottled water to existing coffee makers which is straightforward in design and inexpensive to produce.